Research Background

Liverpool Football Club’s anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, is probably one of the

most famous football songs in the world. People from all around the world might speak different languages, but when it comes to football, a song like "You'll Never Walk Alone" is able to transcend language barriers, geographical frontiers and beyond.

Football is congested with mass media production and mediation. It has been assumed by sports sociologists with interests in sporting policy that professional spectator team sports are only driven by marketing, profits and becoming a global system. The argument is still open to question, but football certainly has the most salient portfolio.

Having taken advantage of football's global broadcasting, I was captivated by its pure passion and charm, even though I was thousands of miles away. It was the 2006 World Cup that ignited my devotion for football and for Liverpool Football Club, as Steven Gerrard scored his first ever World Cup goal with a thunderous effort in a 2-0 win over Trinidad and Tobago. The sounds and images of players and fans cheering, both on the pitch and outside the stadium, was enough to transform an audience like me into a sports lover through live broadcasting and media coverage alone. After the World Cup tournament in 2006, I traced back Gerrard’s roots to Liverpool, and that was the commencement of this ‘overseas sweetheart’ relationship.

Spending so many sleepless nights watching football games became my motivation to go to Anfield ever since and the motivation has become stronger and stronger as time goes by. If it hadn’t been for my passion for Liverpool, I wouldn’t have travelled far and wide to create and collect as many memories related to Liverpool Football Club as I can. For Liverpool FC supporters, Anfield is not only the place that houses those sporting events, but also the vehicle of identity which is one of the essential power of football heritage, attracting people all around the world with multifaceted purposes.

Finally the years of waiting have come to an end in summer 2013. The moment at which I stepped into Anfield struck me with a feeling beyond description. Hearing

“You’ll Never Walk Alone” resound in the stadium and being surrounded by ‘the Reds’

was, indeed, magical. As a global fan, being at Anfield is surreal already, not to mention the ‘Scouser touch’ once you are in Liverpool. I believe that people who have been to Anfield are definitely no stranger to the situation which I just mentioned, but a lot of the times we just let the on-site emotion slip away. That’s why I would love to use this research to capture the fleeting moments, explore and illustrate what kind of memory is being produced through the representation of football heritage and how fans interact and identify with the sporting memory in the context of sport tourism.

Re-evaluation of sport and tourism

Sport has a Janus-faced value in modern life. On the one hand, millions of people choose to play sports or become supporters of sports. For these people, participating in sports-related activities is something which brings people together for a shared purpose and provides a sense of belonging. On the other hand, there is an over-generalisation happening in sports, especially in association football. Football clubs used to be a celebrated traditional working-class sport that repays its local community by providing a focus and a source of civic pride. However, the advent of technology has turned football into a banal entity as people have access to almost everything.

Nowadays, football clubs are becoming international corporations. Fans may feel sickened by the way their favourite sports have been tainted by global commerce, but the truth is that they have no choice. Despite the fact that the globalisation of football has generated a much bigger and better picture for the global football industry, it is a bittersweet feeling for local fans who may now struggle to maintain their connection to their football clubs.

Tourism has become a widespread and a protean practice that occurs in mundane settings, everyday routines, home cities and as well as in far-flung places (Edensor, 2011). The fact that people are in a constant state of departing and arriving makes tourism nothing but a routine procedure of borders and hotel receptionists. The scale and influence of commercialisation in sports is also immense. As regional and

global events have made sport one of the world's most profitable and globalised products, the use of sport as a touristic endeavour has been taken into account from the perspective of philosophical and entrepreneurial development since the 1990s (Kurtzman and Zauhar, 1993). The scope of sport tourism is fairly broad, including sport tourism attractions, sport tourism resorts, sport tourism cruises, sport tourism tours and sport events tourism¹.

Leisure and sports are both seen as important forms of cultural expression, as it is often suggested that football probably has the most universal demographic appeal because of its huge global exposure all over the world. This occurrence perfectly provides an incentive for me to draw on some debatable and contested struggles happening in the football industry as a newly emerging leisure commodity.

The use of heritage as both motive and provider for tourism is widely adopted and appropriated in tourism, yet sport heritage is surprisingly less documented. Sport heritage may include just about anything, from old sports equipment and other related paraphernalia, to museums and halls of fame, choosing what pieces of sporting history contemporary society should inherit and pass on.

Sport in England, like in so many countries, represents heritage on a number of levels, which has probably taken on an almost global heritage appeal. A particular sport can be representative of a nation or a community’s identity. Sports stadia are one type

1 The categories identified used here are extracted from Kurtzman and Zauhar’s serial work on sport tourism. Detailed definitions see: Kurtzman, J. & Zauhar, J. (2003).

of sport heritage evolve from being functional utilitarian buildings to places that hold meaning and instant recognition to both fans and non-fans alike (Bale, 1994; Gaffney and Bale, 2004). We can assume that stadia are the containers of important socio-economic, demographical and psychological issues that can produce interactions and memories. Gammon also points out that sports museums and halls of fame are arguably the most obvious examples of where heritage, sport and tourism meet, and in England are mostly situated within sports clubs (Gammon, 2007). As the emotional attachment to football is slowly giving way to the commercial practicalities, nostalgia is not what it used to be. Yet, for one thing is clear, the understanding and perception of an object, performance or social practice as football heritage lies in the eye of the beholder.

The development of modern football: Liverpool and its ‘Liver bird’

With the foundation of the Football Association in 1863 and the growth of football professionalism in the 1870s, football has expanded both geographically and socially to encompass the industrial, working-class heartlands of London, the Midlands and the North (Crolley and Hand, 2002). It might be the moment when people start recognising football as a major element of working class culture in England, but how was has this stereotype been constructed and imbedded in our minds to the modern day? How did the success of 11 men running around the pitch in short trousers stimulate such passionate and wider view of ‘Englishness’? How does association football distinguish itself among all other spectator sports in England? Before starting to tackle the issues

Some may have suggested that football is mediated as an extension of social structures, values and ‘organised religion’. In Liverpool, the assumption is affirmative based on the

mutual support between football and religion. Football and religion are essential components of the social fabric that provide focus and shape in the lives of countless individuals and communities (Davie, 1993). Since both religious practice and football attendance take place on a regular basis in a collective form, they are capable of producing and enforcing bonding constantly.

Since the 1960s, the performance of Liverpool Football Club fans on the ‘Kop’

stand at Anfield has become a fundamental part of the spectacle and has maintained its hallowed reputation till now (Taylor, 2011). The fact that Liverpool Football Club has directly involved in two significant disasters, Heysel (1985)² and Hillsborough (1989)³, has triggered an emancipation of differentiation one and the other emic and etic. It certainly mitigates the struggles with contested power relationships between fan rivalries. With such a rich historicised identity of Liverpool FC supporter, the emotional investment, identity formation, community cohesion and political economy generate conflicts between one another is gradually on the rise in a global context when putting into the sport tourism context.

2 A stadium disaster happened in Brussels, Belgium. On 29 May 1987 when Liverpool FC met Italian football club Juventus in the European Cup Final. A large group of Liverpool fans breached a fence separating them from a "neutral area" which contained mostly Juventus fans and resulted in the collapse of the wall. 39 supporters of Juventus were crushed to death.

3 A stadium disaster happened in Sheffield, England. On 15 April 1989 during the FA cup semi-final match between Liverpool FC and Nottingham Forest FC. A human crush resulted in the death of 96 people.